At 23, July 28 -- 16 on the night of 23 July, a nodal officer at the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) issued a takedown order to GitHub, giving the company just three hours to comply.

While we have seen many such orders before, what was remarkable about this one was that, instead of identifying a message, post or piece of content to be taken down, it targeted the code repositories of a peer-to-peer messaging application called Bitchat.

Bitchat is an open-source application that lets phones communicate directly over Bluetooth. Messages hop from device to device even when none of them has access to a mobile network or wi-fi, with no need for a central server or for users to create accounts.

A protocol like this is especially ...